All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head. I came in podcasts about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. All right, welcome back to the studios of Inside My Canoe Head.
We appreciate you taking time out of your day to listen to us here. And for all you continued folks, we are quickly approaching episode 100, which, you know, let's be honest, I think that's a pretty decent thing to celebrate, especially in today's chaotic and crazy world that we live in right now. Every once in a while, we need to just sit down and look at ourselves in the mirror and say, hey, you know what, this is pretty cool. Let's just be grateful for what we have and enjoy some glad to do this every once in a while.
So again, thanks for joining us this week. We are going to talk about communication and the difference between emergency management messaging that you're getting from the government and actual communication and talk about the possibilities and the amazing things that can happen out there. So sit back, grab yourself a beverage, and let's get to it. So every week on the professional side of the business, at preparednesslabs.ca, I put out a blog post on Mondays.
And the blog post generally talks about some public policy or bigger ideas related to emergency management. It takes a step up from this, you know, the focus of this podcast, which is individual emergency preparedness. So what we did this week is we reached out and started to have a conversation about the important things related to emergency preparedness week. Now, normally it's the first week of May every year.
It's where the public gets totally inundated with messaging from their local emergency management organization. They talk about a whole bunch of things. Now, typically, they talk about this. What I call the standard encapsulated messaging of being formed, have a plan and get a kit.
And in general, that message is okay. There's really not a lot wrong with it. The problem is, is that that message has been summarily ignored for decades. That's the same message they've been kicking around since FEMA was formed many decades ago.
It's been adopted by the be prepared campaign in Canada. I'm sure in your country, wherever you may be listening this too, there's that standard encapsulated message to tell you to get informed, make a plan for your family, gather some emergency supplies. But nobody's listening, and this is the point. The point is is that after decades of this message issued across the spectrum, whether it was the old-fashioned newspaper ads and mailings that would show up in your mailbox, to today's social media, savvy advertising, people have summarily ignored this.
The preparedness levels as measured as best they can be measured across the developed and developing world have yet to breach the 50% level. And when we do measure, as a researcher, I do this periodically in municipalities, when you do measure the level of preparedness, I don't create a standard saying, you know, I have an idea what I think preparedness is, but what I do is I go in and I take the standard that's expressed by the municipality of what they believe a prepared person is. In other words, what are they telling you to do? So if they tell you to be informed, have a kit, have a plan, then I gotta figure out indicators and key points and nodes that would tell me whether an individual has that stuff.
And then I go out and I measure the population to see how many people on average have this one or two or three of the plans put together as purported or put out by the municipality. And when you do that across any municipality, developed developing, it's usually as long as 18%, but it usually averages around the 30 to 33% of people have taken the necessary steps according to the government guidance to become prepared for an emergency. Now a lot of the research that I look into, just in a professional side when I was doing my PhD, a lot of it looked into how do we bridge that gap? How do we get people to become more prepared?
And there's a lot of great research that talks about why individuals fail to heed the guidance of the government. You know, and people go into, you know, they use a lot of this in behavioral economics and psychology and sociology. You go into the individual self-efficacy, which is, you know, their self-confidence, the individual's worldview, the lens through which they analyze things that happen in the world. You know, do they believe that, you know, the government is a force for good?
I mean, there's a myriad of things you can look at, but a huge piece of the emerging literature talks about the fact that your government doesn't actually talk to you, to you, with you. They talk at you. They tell you what you need to know. Trust me, I'm the expert.
Do the following things and everything will be okay. Well, we all have trusted sources in our lives. We have people that we lean on when the shizzie hits the fizzy in all aspects of our lives. We talked about social capital at length on this podcast about how you have that small group of people that you count on when the world goes sideways or perigate.
And right now the government, your municipal government, is not one of them. So when an event happens where you live, you're not turning to the government or the government sources of information for guidance, you're turning to your trusted sources, the people who have established a relationship with you and have proven that they know things and their advice can be trustworthy. And that's not what emergency management is doing. And this is what I advocate for when I sit down and I work with municipalities and community organizations, that emergency management has to act like a consultancy.
They have to come and they have to start talking with the population. Like for example, if you're a citizen of a city, has the emergency manager asked you whether you would like included in the plan? What thing do you want recovered first? What's the most important thing for emergency management to do in your mind when an emergency happens?
Where do you want your local emergency reception center to be created? Has any of this been asked you? Or is there simple some magical expert with a bunch of post nominal letters who has written a plan and is trying to communicate it with you and telling you that you just need to follow what I've done because I'm the expert, right? That's the problem that we have in emergency management is people aren't asking you what you want.
They're not engaging you in the process of designing the emergency response and preparedness plan for your community. They haven't built a relationship. I'm gonna throw it out there that if I ask you, who is your municipal emergency manager by name, you probably couldn't identify that individual. Do you even follow their social media accounts if they have one?
If they have a social media account, is it engaging? Do they have two-way conversations? If they send out a tweet or a Facebook post about emergency preparedness week and you fire a question, do you get a reasonable and rapid response to somebody engage you? Can you have a discussion or are you summarily ignored?
Or do you get maybe a like or something along that line? It's like, is there any type of relationship building with your government or is it simply an eight another agency telling you what the freak to do when the world goes sideways? You probably don't trust them. You simply don't trust them because you don't know them.
And when I work with people on social media, I'm like, let's be simple. People are on TikTok. People are on Instagram. People are on Twitter.
Why aren't you? I say this to social emergency managers. Why aren't you on social media? And then when I do work with the ones who are on social media, you look at what they actually put out there.
And for example, there was one I was working with had 86 followers on his Twitter handle. Yet he lived in a community that had 25,000 residents, of which about 7,000 or so had some social media presence through some other study that was done in the area. So you had roughly 7,000 people within a population of 25,000 who were at some point actively using social media. Yet you had 86 people that followed you.
And this individual thought that was success because they had a social media presence. But I would say something like this, and a great friend of mine who I consider my mentor gave me the example of where one successful municipality just started a campaign. People love games. They love the ability to win free stuff, right?
So he went to the management and said, hey, listen, I want to be able to hand out a $20 Starbucks card or $20 Timmy's card every single week. 20 times 52, I'm going to ask for $1,040. And so he had a contest. And a contest that asked people questions about what they should do, kits, plans, what should have an, basically, an engagement strategy.
And if you like, comment, and shared the post, you were entered into a draw. Well, this individual grew it from, you know, in the teens up into the many thousands of people in his community. He had, and he had a relationship with him because whenever they commented, he liked, he answered questions. He was regularly engaged because he knew the key part of being an emergency manager is to be that trusted voice.
And he established that over a period of time. So that when a disruption occurs in his municipality, he goes on social media. People are paying attention. The followers are listening.
They're engaging him. They're asking questions about what is going on. He is responding to them. Go, go, go, go.
He is on the social media. He's the trusted source. He's given that information out. And people are following him.
A successful strategy, simply tweeting out various messages. And that's it. We're putting standardized encapsulated messages, be informed, have a plan, make a kit, and throwing that out on social media does not make you a communicator. It makes you a messenger.
And when we talk about community centers, and like, where does a community want the response to happen? I'll give you a prime example. And there's a great initiative funded by a lot of European money in the Caribbean. And the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency or SEDEMA has a program called the Safe School Initiative.
And they realize that a lot of their islands are constantly getting hit by hurricanes. And some of them are significant category four and category five hurricanes. So they realize that there's just never going to be enough money to harden the infrastructure of every building in the community. We can't make all the houses hurricane resistant.
There's number one, no extended building materials to do that. There's no level of money to do that. Nobody could afford a house to do that. So knowing full well that if we get smoked by a hurricane, the majority of houses are going to be destroyed.
They come up with a safe school initiative. So what they do is they invest in the schools and the communities. Now, the schools are usually within walking distance of most residential homes. And they build those structures to take a direct hit from a category five hurricane.
Go ahead and smoke the school. You won't even break one of the windows. And that school becomes the community response center. That's where people go when disaster strikes.
Inside that school, and a sea container out back of the school is going to be all of the necessary supplies. It's going to be your cots and your blankets and your first aid and your fresh water storage. There's going to be communication devices in the school that will enable local residents to reach out to government officials in the capital city or outside the community to tell them what's going on. You harden one part of the community knowing full well that the rest of the community is going to be largely vulnerable because it's exceptionally impossible to harden and resilient every infrastructure.
So take that example and put it in say Canada where I live in the city of Ottawa. I have no idea. And I'm pre-informed in this stuff. I have no idea where the local reception center is.
There's a bunch of schools around. I have a great community center that for the last two years has been used as a vaccine and COVID response center, which is perfectly fine and great. But is that where the community wants it to be? Is where does the community want to go for information?
I'll give you an example. If you have a harden community response center or a community shelter pre-identified and everybody in the community understands where this is, they know if I don't know anything and I can't find out anything as to what's going on, I know the information is going to be available at my community response center. And the government doesn't need to tell me where these reception centers are when a disaster happens because they've already pre-established them. I know in my community when the shizzi hits the fizzy and I need or want to access government information and there's nothing on the radio or whatever, or I can't get access to social media, I know I can walk to my local community center and there will be some government representation there with some measurement of the next steps that the government is taking.
And again, I've said in many social media posts that and throughout this journey that you are responsible for your own outcomes, but one of the key parts of your responsibility in developing your own emergency preparedness plan is gathering information. And one of the key parts of information is what is your government intending to do when the world goes pear-shaped in your community? Do you know that? Do you even know where you're going to find the local emergency management plan?
I don't care about the federal government so your state government or your sub-national government province, all of that regional stuff is fairly irrelevant because it's going to be generalized due to the size and the governance structure, you should be looking for your local municipal emergency management plan. Find it, read it, find the holes in it and ask the questions. You need to know in advance of an event exactly what your community is intending on doing in response. What is your government going to do?
Does that meet your needs? Where is your reception center? All of these things are information that you're going to use to help build your own family emergency preparedness plan, right? So if at some time you wish to or need to engage with the government during a significant disruption, you know where to find them, right?
Picking up the phone and calling 311 in a city of a million people that's under a state of emergency, yeah, nobody's paying any attention. You're probably not even answering 911 calls in the first 24 or 48 hours of a significant disruption. So if you need to get a hold of somebody or need to interact, how are you going to do that? Where is the government going to locate resources in your community?
They may branch out from there to conduct operations but where are they going to quote unquote headquarters their response? The reason for that is, is then you get into the design of community preparedness designs. When we look at community preparedness design, we look at co-facilitating or cohabitating or co-locating the headquarters of the community emergency response operations with that, with the government. And what I mean by community response, because you have a network of community groups and I've talked at length about the power of community groups and the network of information and trusted sources that they provide for the citizens, your community is going to be at work shortly after a disaster, helping a whole bunch of people out and facilitating the movement of resources around from people who have it to people who need it.
This is largely going to be governed more than likely online and in person at some physical center. The idea that we try to communicate to community groups when I work with them is coordinating that and co-locating it either virtually or in person with your municipal government organizations means you have an opportunity to work in collaboration. So when you're looking at being part of that community response plan, when you elevate your game from taking care of your family to now reaching out and wanting to be part of facilitating a community response and you start looking at those networks of people, you're mapping them, you're understanding them, you're figuring out who has what resources within the community and how might they be leveraged in a community level response. This is going to be going on irrespective of what the government is doing at the time.
And so because of that that this is going on, if you engage in that and help it out and be part of that, you're facilitating your community recovery, which is incredibly important, but this only happens when you're gathering the information and this is part of communicating. Read the plan, understand your municipal plan, engage with your municipal emergency managers if you don't understand it, offer your help and services to review the plan, hey listen, I think there's a couple of holes in here, why don't we get a community meeting together, we'll identify the holes to you, we'll give you some ideas of how you can update and fix your community response plan at the municipal level to better serve the ideas and the desires of the community. And that's not always going to be well received by a lot of professionals, but the majority of them will understand the value of having community participation in plan design, plan modernization and plan upgrading and review, especially in the short period of time now where we're post pandemic operations, what I mean by post pandemic is we've done everything to deal with it, now we're just living with it, we have an opportunity now to do a bit of self reflection and talk about what went well, what went wrong and facilitate that for the next one. We don't know what the next disruption will be but we know there will be another disruption.
So setting up these communication channels and identifying to the emergency managers that hey, listen, there's a really interested community out here who is vibrant, who has a very detailed and well-resourced network that would be like to help advise you on how to better construct your municipal emergency response to any disruption that may occur. So that's the key in communicating, it's having that two-way discourse, whether it's in personal, professional lives, we all have these discourse where we as human beings get together and solve problems. That's how we earn success, not by an expert writing a damn plan, publishing it, getting it voted on as a by-law and then just issuing it on a website and patting themselves on the back and going and having a latte. That's not a good emergency manager, though unfortunately that's largely the extent that they do.
So take the time in your lives to learn to communicate, communicate with your emergency managers, understand the community resources that are out there, start viewing your networks. So thanks very much for taking the time to listen to us today at Inside Mind Canoe Head. Please drop over to InsideMindCanoeHead.ca, sign up for the weekly newsletter. We're putting out daily preparedness tips on Buy Me a Coffee, Instagram and Twitter, where we detail a little snippets to make you go, hmm, about emergency management.
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